Team Bush's “November Surprise”Karl Rove's army of evangelical
Christian “values voters” put
President Bush over the top by Bill Berkowitz
www.dissidentvoice.org
November 10, 2004

“I did not see it
coming. I just did not foresee the religious groups and these moral values
issues having the pervasive influence they had here [Ohio]. We thought there
were other issues like jobs and the war that would be so much more
important, and we were wrong.”

-- Bill Burga,
president of the Ohio AFL-CIO, San Francisco Chronicle, November 4, 2004

“If you were to take a
sampling of public opinion in countries all around the world... you find
that the United States, on most of the core cultural issues, is much closer
to Nigeria and Saudi Arabia than to Europe and Japan.”

-- Fareed Zakaria, ABC
News

Forty
years after Senator Barry Goldwater crashed and burned as the Republican
Party's conservative presidential candidate, a consolidated conservative
movement spearheaded by evangelical Christians carried George W. Bush to
victory. The re-election of the president wasn't so much determined by
Soccer Moms, NASCAR Dads, or military voters as it was by Karl Rove's army
of “Values Voters” -- an unwaveringly loyal bloc of Republican Party voters
that marched to the polls and provided President Bush the votes necessary in
a number of key states, including the pivotal battleground state of Ohio.

“They showed up. The Republican base, that is,” wrote Charles Pierce in an
item posted at Eric Alterman's web log, Altercation. “The people who believe
that their marriages are threatened by those of gay people, the people who
believe there were WMD in Iraq and that Saddam waved a hankie at Mohammed
Atta, the people who believe His eye is on every embryo. They all showed up,
and there are more of them than there are of us. This was a faith-based
electorate and, for whatever reason, their belief was stronger than our
reality. This is a country I do not recognize any more.”

With the possible appointment of two, perhaps three, Supreme Court Justices
-- including a Chief Justice -- and dozens of judges in lower courts, more
tax cuts for the wealthy, the further evisceration of social programs, the
privatization of social security, the lowering the wall of the separation of
church and state, and more foreign adventures, conservative Christians have
given the president the opportunity to forge a right wing legacy that could
last well into this century.

Make no mistake about it: Team Bush is dead set on nothing less than
reshaping America.

For
the first time in many election observers' memories, exit polls found that
streams of Bush voters cited their concern about terrorism and “moral
values” in nearly equal numbers as their most important issues. “Moral
values” -- a phrase that has little to do with what constitutes good and
evil and more to do with a set of specific social concerns expressed by
conservative Christians -- handily trumped concerns over taxes, education,
the war in Iraq and health care issues. According to the San Francisco
Chronicle, “Of those who said religious convictions were important as a
quality in their leader, 91 percent voted for Bush.”

Throwing a dart to the heart of the same-sex marriage movement was a major
motivating factor for the turnout of “values voters” in the eleven states
where anti-same-sex marriage initiatives were on the ballot. In Mississippi,
86 percent of voters backed the state's anti-same-sex marriage initiative;
in Arkansas the number was 75; in Georgia it was 77; in Kentucky, 75; in
Oklahoma, 76; in North Dakota, 73; in Utah, 66; in Montana, 66; in Ohio, 62;
in Michigan, 59; and in Oregon, 58.

After twenty-five years of both under the radar organizing and open
campaigning, it is surprising that so many were "surprised" by the existence
of a so-called faith-based electorate. John Zogby, the head of Zogby
International, and Frank Newport, the editor in chief of the Gallup Poll,
maintained that they were caught napping by the emergence of such a
well-organized faith-based electorate.

“When we did our polling before the election and asked people the five most
important issues on their minds, moral values just never came up,” Zogby
told the San Francisco Chronicle. Newport called religion, “the untold story
of this election.”

Well-funded Christian right organizations were elated with the results of
Tuesday's election:

“After a long night the results are in, and it is clear that values voters
have ushered President George W. Bush down the aisle for a second term,”
crowed an ebullient Tony Perkins in a post election day missive from the
Washington, DC-based offices of the Family Research Council.

In
an online fundraising letter, Jon Garthwaite, the editor of TownHall.com,
effusively wrote: “Four more years. That's the verdict from the voters.
President George W. Bush gets a second term. And we conservatives get an
unprecedented opportunity to shape America's future for generations to
come.”

CitizenLink, an online publication of Dr. James Dobson's Focus on the
Family, headlined its post-election story, “’Values Voters’ Make the
Difference.” “For too long, liberal political pundits have been telling us
that issues like marriage and life divide us as a people,” said Gary Bauer,
a former Republican presidential candidate and president of the pro-family
group American Values. But it's clear that while those issues may be
controversial, they are not divisive.

“People reach across such boundaries as party, economic status and ethnic
group to join together to support and protect the American family. This is
the year of the “values voter’”

Appearing on the Southern Baptist Convention television network FamilyNet,
Richard Land, the president of the SBC Ethics & Religious Liberty
Commission, called Bush's victory -- coupled with Republican majorities in
both the House and Senate – “a testimony to the president's ability to
connect with the American people.”

Two
years ago, longtime GOP activist Mark McKinnon opined on the cultural divide
in the country in a conversation with journalist Ron Suskind. In Suskind's
recent New York Times Magazine piece titled “Without a Doubt,” he reported
on the exchange:

“You think he's
[President Bush] an idiot, don't you?” I [Suskind] said, no, I didn't. “No,
you do, all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few
blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We
don't care. You see, you're outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide
middle of America, busy working people who don't read The New York Times or
Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like
the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They
have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled
syntax, it's good for us. Because you know what those folks don't like? They
don't like you!” In this instance, the final “you”, of course, meant the
entire reality-based community.

To
many who have followed the rise of the Christian Right in American politics,
the mobilization of the faith-based electorate was not a surprise. Jerry
Sloan, the head of Project Tocsin, a Sacramento, California-based
organization founded by in 1991 “to monitor the political activities of
Religious Political Extremists in Sacramento County” said in a recent
e-mail: “For the past decade Democrats have ignored, fled from, and failed
to address the Radical Religious Right head on. This failure has now placed
our beloved Republic in dire peril.”

In
the end, there was no significant October Surprise; Osama bin Laden wasn't
captured, and his well-timed video caused a major stir but only a minor
blip. And there were no unseemly personal revelations about either of the
candidates. The large turnout of “Values Voters” did, however, result in a
“November Surprise.”

Bill Berkowitz
is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His
WorkingForChange.com column Conservative Watch documents the
strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the American
Right.